World

Reddit Apologizes for Boston Marathon 'Witch Hunt'

Last Thursday night, as police in the Boston area engaged in a deadly shootout with two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings, much of the social web was sure that Reddit users had successfully identified one of the two fugitives.

Sunil Tripathi had gone missing from Brown University about a month prior. He bore a passing resemblance to grainy footage the FBI had released of its "Suspect #2." When a rumor spread that his name had passed over a police scanner from the shootout scene, Reddit's miraculous moment seemed all but assured.

Tripathi's name became a worldwide Twitter trend as thousands upon thousands of reporters, digital onlookers and self-appointed media pundits speculated on his motive and lauded the power of the Reddit crowd.

There was just one problem: Sunil Tripathi had nothing to do with the Boston Marathon bombings, as the world learned early Friday morning.

On Monday, Reddit itself took a major step in acknowledging the social web's darker corners and unintended consequences by posting a public apology for the misinformation spread on its message threads. In addition to Tripathi, a number of other men — including a high school track star — were falsely pinpointed as suspects on Reddit and other sites.

"We have apologized privately to the family of missing college student Sunil Tripathi, as have various users and moderators," Erik Martin, Reddit's general manager, wrote in a post to the site's official blog. "We want to take this opportunity to apologize publicly for the pain they have had to endure."

Martin continued that mix-ups such as the one involving Tripathi were exactly the reason Reddit banned personal information from the site years ago:

A few years ago, reddit enacted a policy to not allow personal information on the site. This was because “let’s find out who this is” events frequently result in witch hunts, often incorrectly identifying innocent suspects and disrupting or ruining their lives. We hoped that the crowdsourced search for new information would not spark exactly this type of witch hunt. We were wrong. The search for the bombers bore less resemblance to the types of vindictive internet witch hunts our no-personal-information rule was originally written for, but the outcome was no different.

The Boston Marathon bombings killed three people and wounded over 175 more. As its aftermath gripped Boston in sorrow and fear, an investigation returned few immediate results. But well before Tripathi was erroneously fingered as "Suspect #2," the FBI had already issued a strong rebuke of Internet vigilantes.

Eventually, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was correctly identified as the suspect some mistook for Tripathi. He evaded police for several hours on Thursday night and into Monday morning, until finally being apprehended alive with the help of some thermal cameras and a robot.

While the attack's aftermath did reveal much that lacks in the social media news landscape, the web also helped spread messages of hope and inspiration.

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